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3,477 cars parked by their colour

On a lighter note than the previous posts: this is a mashup of social experiment and art, and by the sounds of it, it was a great success. This one happened in the mid-nineties – 1994 to be exact. Artist Mark Tribe explains::

“Nina Katchadourian, Steven Matheson and Mark Tribe were invited to work collaboratively on a site-specific project at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California for inSite ‘94, a binational art exhibition that takes place at various locations throughout San Diego and Tijuana.

Southwestern College is surrounded by a moat-like ring of parking lots. You can’t enter the campus without crossing a sea of concrete. Each day, Southwestern’s 3,477 parking spaces fill and empty several times with the cars of the students, faculty and staff who commute to Southwestern from all over the San Diego and Tijuana area.

On August 31, 1994 from 6am to noon, a team of 50 professional and volunteer parking attendants directed the arriving cars to predetermined lots according to car color. Each of the fourteen lots was filled with cars of a different color: dark blue, blue, light metallic blue, silver & gray, black, beige, brown, metallic raspberry, yellow, electric blue, white, aqua, green and red.”